James Hyde working space practice studio

Between Bild and Built

Chapter 6: Working space

For Hyde, giving this activity of visual self-awareness a form is a concrete, indeed a substantial, work program. Allowing the substances, materials and things to shift their „sense“ implies allowing them to do things that are new and different from the purposes for which they were originally intended. An enhanced value is elicited from things, so that they reveal what they are by showing what further potential resides in them. Insofar as Hyde is concerned with this moment of metamorphosis – rather than with the development of a particular form or even style – his work is continually changing from a conjunction of medium and form to one that is new, different, unexpected. The three undetermined factors of the medium, the form and the process that mediates between them open up an artistic space of possibilities. This is what Frank Stella has called „working space“. In a lecture, Stella once claimed that the aim of art is to create space – space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, but space in which the subjects of painting can live. According to Stella, it is a matter of creating both a space in which things and experiences can come into their own, as well as a space in which art itself can live.
For his own part, Hyde has said: „I enjoy making things and looking at things; that’s what studio practice is about. If you’re not enjoying the materials – how they come together, the play in the work – it doesn’t really matter what ideas you have because they’re left for dead.“ The space of the studio in which Hyde pursues his „joyous science“ is consequently both imaginary and real in much the same way as the space of painting to which Stella alludes; a box filled with materials in various conditions in which there occurs a wondrous multiplication of the space. It happens because things have the potential to transform themselves – because the thing in itself can become something else in an instant.
Translated from the German by Peter Cripps